12/21/07
This past Sunday, S and I were out at the West Seattle Farmer's Market simply bathing in street performing nostalgia. We played open air music for the smattering of vendors and customers, all seasonally adjusted to enthusiastic encouragement. We rocked, we scatted, we crooned, we made babies dance. I blatted out a medley of Christmas favorites on solo trombone. And two cold and windy hours of frolic later, we toddled home with chump change, the equivalent of a half shift at a 7-11. Not half shabby for the street, though. And there was all that encouragement, of course.

As the tee shirt I was gonna make someday says, street performing is an adventure, it's just not a job. But we can be forgiven: it's honeymoon season. This December marks the 30th anniversary of our whirlwind courtship and marriage, a process that was framed and metered by busking.

Ah, busking. Sport of kings of the road, art for ARRRt's sake. Over the three decades of Amber Tide, the street has always been a known quality, a low-rent safety net for our high-flying muddled dreams of glory, something to fall back on or into. It never let us down, even if it never let us up either.

Lifers though we may be, we've has gone through a number of changes vis a vis the Second, Third or Fourth Oldest Profession (depending on who you ask). At the beginning it was all about the romance of the ride, the whole interstate highway Jack Kerouac-ness of it all, along with the transgressive carney thrill of scraping a buck off the madding crowd without the intervention of agents and owners and managers oh my. We got several years of improbable roller coaster paid vacations out of that premise before our decadent bourgeois craving for food, shelter and clothing got the better of us and drove us into the bars.

Once loosely ensconced in the highly-questionable arms of lounge entertainment, busking predictably enough morphed into The Good Old Days Of Six Months Ago When We Was Free. Never mind that We Was also Hungry, Homeless And Disreputable. At least the lounges let you wear good clothes and bathe regularly, and they paid (fairly) decent money on a predictable basis. Somehow, though, doing impressions of the Hits Of The 80's (Lionel Richie! Michael Jackson! More Lionel Richie!) for clueless tourists and business travelers at low-end destination hotels proved less than artistically challenging. Either we were overqualified for the job (too many chords in that Elvis cover, dude) or totally inadequate (I am not Michael Jackson nor was meant to be). We gravitated toward fern bars that let us play muzak jazz and rowdy roadhouses that we could inspire to revelry with blues and crummy rock, and I hacked our scruffy pre-MIDI electronics so I could emulate a guitar trio. A really lame guitar trio.

Eventually, inevitably, we ended up back ON THE ROAD AGAIIINNNN (that's enough, Willie) (I said, enough), on tour to the next town, 13 foot trailer and three cats in tow, plundering opportune street scenes along the way. Suddenly, we were back in what felt like our native element, a life we were seemingly born for, this time with experience on our side. We knew exactly what we were doing and we did it anyway and reveled in every glorious threadbare broken-axled outtagas wilderness moment of it. It was tedious. It was mythic. It might have gone on indefinitely if Sandahbeth hadn't gotten sick.

The long slow (and I mean slow) second act of our marriage has been a premature retirement, S in the throes of unspeakable malady and me gamely paddling my little rowboat through the hurricane keeping up as best I can. The government does its best for medical, and my continuing relationship with the great god Tinker bears me up monetarily, barely. But despite the travails of sedentary caregiving, taking and receiving, we're dedicated, crazy and game enough to continue playing the occasional street corner, at this point as much for the recreation (in a couple meanings of that word) as anything else.

The big problem now is transpo. Busking is an all-too-spontaneous sport, subject to fits of ambition and inclement monsoons. Sandahbeth, however, is a wheelchair person, desperately in need of strategic planning. It isn't doing the work that's the issue, it's getting to where the work is. For several years we made do with a minivan, a folding ramp and hauling S around like a sack of potatoes. Last year, we reached a point for several months when even that wasn't possible, and the eventual workaround, board transfer from a lift chair, was not only precarious to pull off but murder on S's backside. Watching us squeeze and strain and grunt to transplant her to and from the car seat, several of our friends began openly and pointedly wondering when we were gonna get a wheelchair van anyway?

The short answer was never — my budget posited cars as disposable as Bic shavers and only slightly more durable. But fool cussedness springs eternal here in Chickadee Glen, and I started trolling the Craigslist auto ads. Last month, I struck, if not gold, at least fool's gold: a down-on-its-luck Plymouth Voyager with a lowered floor (not a raised roof) and a ramp (not a hoist) and a removable passenger seat (not a space in the cargo hold). Despite a number of issues (long story, still being resolved), it's a reasonably attractive, reasonably strong, almost affordable vehicle that actually enables our entertaining al fresco by reducing the curb on leaving the house from the Normandy invasion to just, well, leaving the house.

That's good news for a couple of performance junkies like us. Here on the cusp of XXX, it's a hopeful sign that, given the opportunity, we might just be able to whip up a third act galavanting about again, even on a limited basis. Anything to relieve the tedium of ordinary life. Honestly, I don't know how you guys stand it.